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Category Christmas

Back in November, I taught at The Crafty Scrapper’s Christmas Carousel event. It was an all-day event, where I taught this 1-hour class five times. It was an exhausting day, but a lot of fun – especially for all the women who were crafting.

I used Prima’s “Sweet Peppermint” collection to make this Santa’s Visit gift card holder. We started with plain chipboard that we cut and scored into a little sleeve and drawer.

We decorated the box inside and out.

Some embellishments from Maya Road (bottle brush tree) and Tim Holtz (mini reindeer) are decorated and blinged to make Santa feel welcome.

I wonder how many of the crafters are going to give away their boxes? I don’t think I could part with it!

I love the idea of making an advent calendar. I just never get around to doing it. But this year is different. I bought the bare frame from Sa Crafters at the big scrapbook convention last summer. I spent Thanksgiving weekend putting it together, painting, and decorating.

I used images from Graphic 45’s Nutcracker Sweet collection (from a few years ago). I embellished with some new and vintage Christmas items from my collection.

The drawers are covered in vintage sheet music with numbers embossed with red glitter embossing powder.

The tree is a craft store bottle brush tree that I bleached a light green color, and then decorated with alcohol ink-dyed beads and tinsel trim. (Did you notice the snowflakes, a nod to the Waltz of the Snowflakes? And the candy canes for the Peppermint?)

Each year, I make a new batch of Christmas cards. They are usually a vintage style and almost always feature an image that evokes memories of Christmases past.

This year, I decided to use up some of the supplies that are hanging around the craft room. I combined the new Prima “Sweet Peppermint” papers with some older Bo Bunny, or whatever I had on hand.

I usually make one style of card and then create a pile that are all identical. This year, I used a similar style on all the cards, but each is different. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

Each card has a vintage book page, various patterned papers, and a beautiful vintage image as the centerpiece. Some of the images are from patterned papers and others are printed from vintage postcards.

When I’m prepping for a class or other big project, I do some samples of techniques or with new products to see how I like them. While trying to create a background for my Believe ornament class, I tested different paints and colors on cardboard until I figured out what I liked. So, now I have all this fancy painted cardboard that is perfect to use in other projects!

For this project, I used a piece of the painted cardboard as the base. I painted it with a few colors of Distress Paint and silver Bo Bunny Glitter Paste.

I had also tested out some dies on the new KaiserCraft Home for Christmas collection, so added one as a frame around the sentiment, from the same collection.

I was inspired by The Crafty Scrapper’s holiday tags to create a few more. I was also inspired by the shaker ornaments on Anne’s Paper Creations blog. But, I didn’t want to make ornaments, I wanted to make more tags! So, I made a shaker ornament and then added it to my tag.

I started with a large manila tag that I covered with a sheet from the new KaiserCraft Home for Christmas collection. I used the same Spellbinders die that I used to make the shaker ornament to cut a hole in my tag so you could still see through the ornament.

After adhering the ornament, I added the rest of the embellishments. The greenery was cut using Tim Holtz’s Holiday Greens dies. I made the pine cones using another Tim Holtz die.